Under the Hawthorn Tree by Ai MiUnder the Hawthorn Tree, by Ai Mi, started off with promise. A young Chinese girl named Jingqui, naive but smart, is sent off into the villages to document life in order to write more accurate history textbooks. Set in China in the 1970's the book is heavily rooted in the cultural revolution. Interest is peaked. A tale is told of a hawthorn tree with flowers dyed red from the blood of soldiers. The backdrop is set with an old folktale of a maiden torn between two loves. I wasn't 100% which way the story would go, but I expected some sort of excitement, really.
The downfall of Under the Hawthorn tree, though, was that it really wasn't all that gripping. Little happens in terms of drama and plot, and though there are moments of great family loyalty, and the love interest, Old Third, is introduced, things move far too slowly for too long to really keep the reader interested. Furthermore, the naive Jingqiu is neither sweetly innocent, nor undergoes a knowledge revelation, as would warrant character development. Instead, she continually misinterprets signs and things people tell her. This becomes frustrating as she neither seeks to clarify, nor do other characters pick up on her extreme ignorance. While naivety is not a bad quality for a main character, it became increasingly frustrating in this instance as very simple misunderstandings lead to unrealistic conclusions. The novel itself plays on this by seeming to present information in a cryptic way, making the reader assume one thing when the opposite may be true. This tact could class as mystery, but rather comes across as a frustrating repetition of drawn out scenes and little-explained feelings. Is she being coy, or simply unaware of other's affections? Does Old Third lie to her?
What promised itself to be a Romeo and Juliet style romance, fraught with uncertainties and trials, became instead a tale about the mundane life of a young Chinese girl. Though appearances were made by Old Third, and there were glimpses of a budding romance, it came too little too late and Jingqiu's walls came down too unexpectedly for me to invest myself in the romance as much as I would have liked. Jingqiu simply wasn't someone I could connect with. Though her connection with Old Third eventually becomes a sweet one, and there are certainly moments of grand romance, the plodding nature of the novel throughout took away from these moments, and dulled the shine that could have been a sweet young love. The redeeming character was Old Third himself, resolute and kind, but as the story did not focus on him and rather Jingqui, there were certainly narrative lulls.
While the setting, China during the cultural revolution, was both interesting and less common, it provided both interest and problem to those less familiar with the time. Having studied modern Chinese History, there were elements that struck me, but the oddities present in this time did provide some-what of a struggle in terms of ease of reading. There were moments that wording and phrases seemed out of place for the anti-liberal society, though this may be due to translation.
Overall, the story provides a good account of life in China in the 1970's, and the struggles a young girl has to face in the upside down social structure facing the cultural revolution, but in terms of great romantic stories, I found the novel to have only scratched the surface of what could have been a very moving, deep story of love.
